sean martin

Menu

Monthly Archives: October 2017

I’ve had a few readers ask me, generally at the beginning of a storyline, “Okay, Sean, WTF are you doing now? This isnt making any sense!”

And they’re right, of course. At the beginning, the story usually doesnt make any sense. Look at the current one: Aiko, a FTM transsexual, is in what we might read as Hell with God, who’s portrayed as a plus-size woman with a down-home approach to just about everything. He’s been physically changed (“so you’ll blend in, honey”) and is now sitting in a church service… in Hell… as God asks him to tell Her what they’re praying for.

Yeah, if I were dropped into all this, I wouldnt have much of a clue what was going on either. 🙂

But here’s the thing, such as it might be: when I start one of these, I generally dont quite know where they’re going either. Oh, I have a bit of a clue. but it’s nothing that’s been laid out episode by episode, detail by detail. As the old saying goes, I enjoy the journey more than the destination. Sometimes the byways the journey takes me on lead to a much different destination that the one I originally had in mind. Sometimes it doesnt. We still get… somewhere… right?

Look, anyone can tell a story. You, me, anyone. Lots of people do it, every single day of the week. The internet is replete with stories — some true, some not, some not but with enough symbolism that you know the truth of what they’re saying. You’ll find most of the latter here, probably because right now it feels like the strip is going through another evolution.

Yeah, after all this time, Sean’s rethinking the concept yet again.

See, when I started this, it was pretty much exclusively about LGBTQ issues and how we, both individually and as a community at large, deal with them. If you look back deep enough (I really gotta get that index finished!), you’ll find stories about… well, the sort of things you’d expect to find in an LGBTQ webcomic. Stories about fidelity and monogamy. Gay wedding proposals. Dealing with the fringe elements of sexual expression. God knows, politics… plenty of that, to be sure, because that’s one easy target to hit.

But I wanted to take on issues that may be somewhat too complex for a daily webcomic. Life. Death. The hereafter, in this case. Our place in this vast universe, not just as LGBTQ folks but as human beings as well. The sort of things you start thinking about at a certain point in life, just because you can feel the wall of Mortality coming into view.

Well, that got depressing, right?

But it’s not meant to be. When I leave this rock, I’ll have this grand, five thousand page graphic novel about a bunch of guys from Canada to serve as my legacy for as long as it’s remembered. Not many people get the opportunity to create something as lavish as that, but if I’m going to do it, I want to make reading it worth the while.

So… to answer the question raised at the beginning… sometimes, no, I have no idea where a story is going. But hopefully, it eventually clicks in, and we find out together. That means we get to make the journey as traveling companions, not with me as tour guide. And I like that.